Review: 'It's No Good' by Kirill Medvedev

A Russian dissident for our times

April 26, 2013|By Michael Robbins

This conscious turn to the left, and away from "the scene," is not unprecedented. "In the end" — this is Gessen recreating the reasoning behind Medvedev's self-exile — "all of this was in some profound way irrelevant. Arguments about poetry never spilled over into real life. They did not change anyone's behavior." Reading his essays and actions — some quite careful, others packed with rant and spleen — you realize Medvedev is a poet in a "general sense," rather than a versifier whose main concern is the production of the verbal artifact we call a poem: "Poetry, in a general sense," writes Shelley in "A Defence of Poetry," "may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man." His break with the literary world has a correspondence in the American poet George Oppen's 25 years of silence, during which, out of a commitment to communism, he wrote no poems at all. In his most eloquent essay, "My Fascism," Medvedev defines poetry as "the maximal expression, via the medium of language, of this or that authentic way of seeing."

And it is this — the quest for an authentic way of seeing — that leads to Medvedev's wholesale rejection, a "no" upon which a "yes" might be built. He calls it a "rebellion of humanism." "'There is no freedom from politics': this is the banal truth that one must now grasp anew." For Americans, and especially for American writers and artists, Medvedev's texts must have the force of a clarion call. Gessen worries in the introduction about the compromise involved in publishing with Viking-Penguin, but of course walking away — which is what Medvedev did — is easier said than done. "For qualms such as mine, people IN THIS SYSTEM often receive presents — and I would not like to receive any presents": This "no" is maybe the hardest one for a writer to say. But it is one that Medvedev forces us to hear, albeit in a different country, with different situations on the ground.

Perhaps, though, real as the differences are, what Medvedev really makes us see are similarities, even identities. American liberals are rightly aghast at Putin's repression of Pussy Riot, but what did they do to stop the police violence that put an end to the Occupy movement? What are they doing about the CIA's drone wars? But enough — we've drifted rather far from questions of art by now. Haven't we?